Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business

How to prep your Pinterest boards for the holiday selling season

It’s almost August and that means summer is soon coming to an end, school will be starting and it’s time to begin planning out your Pinterest business strategy for the busy holiday selling season. Say what?!? It’s true! You’ll thank us come September because you’ll be ahead of the game and not pressed for time when you’ll want to focus on Facebook parties, vendor events and helping your team. Pinterest is an enormous search engine that has the ideal audience for many small business owners who are searching for that perfect holiday gift for their loved ones (and let’s be honest, we all pin for ourselves too!). So how do you show up in their feed and have them pin your pins, follow your boards and buy from you when they’re ready? It’s easy and we’re here to show you how!

Pin as a business
You’ll definitely want to convert your Pinterest account to a business account if you haven’t yet done so. This way you’ll be given the tools you need, aka Pinterest Analytics, to see which pins are working for you and you’ll really be able to market your account as a business professional. Rich Pins are free and have added features such as having the price of your product and where it can be purchased right in the description. You can leave all the boards you have already created for your personal Pinterest account because if they are of interest to you, they should be of interest to your audience, but you have the option to make any of them Secret, it’s totally up to your discretion.

Think strategically
You don’t need hundreds of boards filled with millions of pins to get those repins, you simply need a handful of strategically thought out, quality boards that relate to your business and have pins with eye-catching graphics. Create a list of topics that interest you, along with the holidays, and keep your products in mind as to how these boards can include them. For example, if you are selling essential oils, you can have a Holiday Decor board and pin the oils that give off amazing aromas in the home; Holiday Entertaining is a perfect board to include products such as Pampered Chef and Princess House; Tastefully Simple and Wildtree would both work amazingly well in a Holiday Recipes board. You get the idea! Be sure to repin great ideas and tips to the boards, not only fill them up with your own product pins, and you’ll have people following your boards to see all the goodies you have to offer.

Use hashtags
You can now search via hashtags in Pinterest, so it’s a great idea to pin your pins with a description which includes the hashtags that correspond with it. Pinterest says to “be specific and descriptive. Use words or phrases that describe the content in the Pin – we recommend you add no more than 20 hashtags per Pin. It’s best to be objective and use hashtags that make sense and are relevant to the Pin. Depending on your Pin, consider using hashtags that are timely (e.g. #oscars, #backtoschool, #halloween) and/or hashtags for evergreen content that works well on Pinterest (e.g. #mealplanning, #hairgoals, #homedecor). This is to help make it easier to for users to filter and find relevant content they are interested in.” Pinterest will put the most recent pins with the hashtag at the top of the feed which is why you definitely want to add them to your pin descriptions! Look whose pin popped up after we pinned our blog post and did a search:

Review your boards
Check your pins in your boards to see if any of the links are broken and if they are your own pins, make sure the content is relevant to that board’s topic. Delete any pins that have less than 10 repins as those can hinder your board’s visibility and if you have any comments on your pins, definitely reply to them!

Join group boardsThere are a plethora of great and active group boards out there that you can join that will bring a ton more visibility to your pins. Request to join them, abide by the creators’ rules and have fun pinning your own content to them!

CinchTips:
• Be sure to pin your own content to the boards. You do NOT want to repin other consultants’ pins to your boards or you will be sending people right to them and lose a potential sale. We love pinning from CinchShare so that we know we’re pinning our own content that we’ve either scheduled to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, or saved for later use.
• Pin 3-5x a day to keep your engagement up and space out your pins instead of pinning all at once so you are seen by different people throughout the day. Pinterest is most active around 11pm EST so save your best pins while you’re pinning before bedtime. That’s when moms tend to pin the most!
• Design your own Pinterest graphics so that you can really stand out. We create vertical graphics using the Design with Canva button in CinchShare as those are repinned the most. Making a few different graphics for the same blog post or product post is also a great idea so that you can pin them several times!

• Change up the pin destination! You aren’t only limited to sending pinners to your website. You can send them to your blog, FB business page,VIP group or Instagram account. It’s really up to you, as you can change the url in CinchShare and send them where you feel they’ll get to know, like and trust you which will have them turn into long term, loyal customers.

We hope you have fun prepping your Pinterest account for the holiday selling season! Start now and you’ll be ready to go when shopping is on everyone’s mind. We’ll be keeping an eye out for you!